No, JK, JK. Everyone's manhood and womanhood and non-binaryhood is still intact, no matter what the conservative gender-apocalypse-mongers are sure to do with this story. You can still be whatever gender you want to be, and embody whatever stereotypes you wantfrom swaggering alpha douche to limp lily on the fainting couch.

But the ever-progressive nation of Sweden has introduced a new gender-neutral pronounhen (neither the masculine han nor the feminine hon)into its official National Encyclopedia. It's a heartening step in broadening the concept of gender and giving institutional validation to those for whom gender is more complicated than the stiff old male/female dichotomy. (And this is just an aside, but it brings to mind the aggressive challenges to gender in the new album from Swedish band The Knife.)

Here's Slate: Hen was first mentioned by Swedish linguists in the mid-1960s, and then in 1994 the late linguist Hans Karlgren suggested adding hen as a new personal pronoun, mostly for practical reasons. Karlgren was trying to avoid the awkward he/she that gums up writing, and invent a single word "that enables us to speak of a person without specifying their gender. He argued that it could improve the Swedish language and make it more nuanced.

This is what is coming post SSM. It isn't enough to simply coexist or be tolerant they intend to transform society and not just in Sweden. This pernicious roots are already taking hold here with teaching grade schoolers about multiple genders and encouraging kids to participate in same sex experimentation.

Sweden where they made it unPC for a man to stand while peeing. The effort to make standing and peeing illegal thankfully failed. I wonder how many men in Sweden were brow beaten into sitting and peeing?

Yeah. Sweden is over run with progressive leftist nuts. They don’t allow homeschooling, they don’t allow freeplay or playing with toys cars because it might encourage gender normative behavior because nothing is as horrible as being a normal little boy or girl. Someday these people are going to find out the meaning of going too far.

25
posted on 05/01/2013 3:46:54 PM PDT
by Maelstorm
(This country wasn't founded with the battle cry "Give me liberty or give me a govt check!")

And so Newspeak marches on. The goal, of course is to make it impossible to express a non-PC thought because the language simply won’t be there. Think about it. If a child is taught that there is only the single word “hen” available to use in speaking and writing, the distinction between the sexes will simply melt away. I don’t see anything good coming from this.

26
posted on 05/01/2013 3:48:24 PM PDT
by D_Idaho
("For we wrestle not against flesh and blood...")

Somoeone got caught reading a snarky headline and took it literally. The Swedes are creating something in their language that didn’t exist yet. Rather than simply calling a person “it”, they’ve come up with a replacement for Han and Hon that is the equivalent of “it”, but not so impersonal. The article explains that. The lefties at Jezebel actually made the point that conservatives would react the way that many here have.

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